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Three Years of the International SCEC/USGS Community Stress Drop Validation Study: What Have We Achieved and Where Next

Description: 

The SCEC/USGS Community Stress Drop Validation study has engaged a wide international community since its launch in 2021. The broad aim of the collaboration is to improve the quality of estimates of stress drop and related fundamental earthquake source parameters (corner frequency, source duration, etc.) and their uncertainties, to enable more reliable ground motion forecasting, and to obtain a better understanding of earthquake source physics. Seismological estimates of stress drop from earthquake spectral measurements have become standard practice over the last 50 years, but their wide variability, model dependence and inconsistency between studies have led to controversy and concerns about how to assess and interpret these measurements.

We present the findings of the community comparative analysis of a common data set of earthquakes in the 2019 Ridgecrest, California, sequence, focusing on what we have learnt about assessing the accuracy and stability of different estimates. We also discuss the development of plans for the next stage of this community endeavor in which we aim to work towards providing the optimal characterization of earthquake source parameters for the various user communities. This will likely include a community experiment involving model-generated synthetic data. We welcome new members to the study, wishing to observe, learn or more actively participate; more information can be found at https://www.scec.org/research/stress-drop-validation.

Session: Understanding and Quantifying the Variability in Earthquake Source Parameter Measurements - I

Type: Oral

Date: 5/3/2024

Presentation Time: 09:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Rachel

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Authors